Environmental agency to look at past violations by polluters

AUSTIN (AP)  State environmental regulators have altered their course and now plan to consider past violation notices when assessing a polluter's record.

The Texas Natural Resource Conservation Commission staff, responding to criticism from five legislators and hundreds of residents, has changed its proposed enforcement rules so that notices of violations issued since September 1999 would be counted in establishing a company's compliance history. The previous proposal would have wiped the slate clean on prior violation notices, which are the most common enforcement action.

Rep. Fred Bosse, a Democrat from Houston who sponsored the 2001 law overhauling the conservation commission, said he was mostly satisfied with the changes.

"I now believe the conservation commission is making a good-faith effort to use all the compliance history that is available to them," he told the Austin-American Statesman.

The new enforcement strategy is to be based on a company's five-year record. But when the program starts next year, only three years of prior violation notices will be counted. New notices will be added as they are reported until a five-year record exists.

That compromise was needed because the agency has computerized records of violation notices only back to 1999. Manually reviewing files of 220,000 facilities would take too much time, according to commission documents explaining the change.

The revised rules also would count violations that companies report to the commission based on self-audits.

The rules still must be approved Wednesday by the three commissioners who oversee the agency.